April 30, 2017

The bears

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Dmitry Vasyukov and Werner
Herzog, 2010). If this feels uncharacteristic of Herzog, it’s because he came
to it late: Vasyukov had made a series of four one-hour docos tracking four seasons in a
remote part of Siberia before Herzog saw it and offered to recut it, narrate it
and re-release it as a feature. Not only does it not look Herzogian, but the narration is
unusually straight and subdued, free of both philosophical speculation and the occasional sideways mockery of subjects. But in another important way, it feels like a response to
Grizzly Man. If Timothy Treadwell was a deluded sentimentalist who paid with
his life, the Russian hunters in Happy People share Herzog’s wary respect for nature.
These bears are mindless vandals and killers, and a hunter knows to keep his
distance. A black bear is only seen once but their presence is sensed throughout and a story
told about a bear attack is the only truly harrowing moment in the film. Nature, for Herzog, is always unsentimental.